Cast Away the Clouds

Double Agent; 2006

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I must be a horrible person. I mean, I used to think criticizing Rose Melberg was kinda like tearing the wings off a butterfly. In the early 1990s, Melberg's Sacramento-based band Tiger Trap recorded one of the essential indie pop albums, giddy with crush-love and sugar fizz. The Softies, her subsequent duo with current All Girl Summer Fun Band member Jen Sbragia, leaned toward fragile, iridescent prettiness, and were every bit as special. You know who probably hates It's Love, their modest 1995 masterpiece? Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Who also used to go to animal shelters, adopt cats as pets, and then dissect their hearts. Just sayin'.

Melberg's latest album, Cast Away the Clouds, isn't her solo debut-- that was 1998's lo-fi hodgepodge Portola-- but it's her first record since the Softies called it quits after 2000's characteristically winsome Holiday in Rhode Island. While I'd rather not notice the differences here, they don't get much starker: tasteful acoustic guitars instead of tinny electrics, clumsy overconfidence instead of awkward naivete, and worst of all, stuffy seriousness instead of girlish wonder. The term "twee" can be an insult or a rallying cry, but it should never be applied to Cast Away the Clouds, because this record is unmistakably mature, like so many artists' late-career disappointments.

So, goodbye cuddlecore heroine, hello dull singer-songwriter. Opener "Take Some Time" does have echoes of the Softies in the sparse instrumentation and Melberg's understated harmonies, but it's oddly sterile, detached. "It's gonna take some time/ To fix this love of mine," Melberg sings, her still-whispery voice a bit more conventionally pleasant than it once was. Besides, who says that? Slow, mostly acoustic arrangements throughout emphasize Melberg's double-track laments, occasionally enlivened by piano. "If you don't extend your hand with passionate intent..." begins one crime against language. Only "Irene" adds drums, jazzy hi-hat, and bouncy ivories that hint at "Linus and Lucy", but Melberg gives away too much in the opening line: "So tired/ Waking up uninspired."

Like other Melberg outings, Cast Away the Clouds retains a consistent feel, so other songs drifty sleepily by sounding much the same, give or take an extraneous violin or flute solo. OK, "Constant and True" breaks the mold with chiming ukulele and a guest vocal by P:ano's fey, talented Nick Krgovich. Meanwhile, it's not that Melberg has gone soft-- anyway, how could she?-- but something on this album has gone cold, and the clouds refuse to budge. Hey, Rose, I was ready to be heartbroken. Just not like this.